Archive for the ‘Globalization’ Category

I’m always looking for new ways to discover things to read. It really concerns me that I might get set into certain patterns, and miss something which might change my thinking just out of habit.

I’ve done it different ways, but today, I thought I’d pick a random country and see what was in the USA Kindle store for it. Sure, I want to expand my horizons, but I want the convenience of buying from the Kindle store…and doing something I think is illegal or immoral (for me) is not where I’m going to go.

In terms of methodology, I figured I’d go with United Nations member states. That doesn’t cover every country, but does cover quite a few. So, I started with the

to give me a random number between one and twenty-six (to get a letter), and then had it give me a random number for the number of countries that started with that letter. That was just a simple way to do it.

The letter was “D” and the number was “6”…which is the Dominican Republic.

The Dominican Republic joined the UN on October 24, 1945…which means it joined in the first year (but wasn’t one of the very first).

at no additional cost for members of Amazon’s subser (subscription service). I’ve been a happy KU member since they started, so I do always check that. In fact, I basically read e-books I already own (our adult kid just gave me a bunch of science fiction pulp anthologies) or books from KU. I put other books on my wish list for my family. 🙂

Alvarez is a native of the Dominican Republic, and wrote How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents.

It’s based on real events in history, when “Las Mariposas” (The Butterflies”) who, as siblings, opposed the dictatorial leader Trujillo.

That’s exactly the kind of cultural thing I would think would give me insight into a country’s thoughts and feelings…like an expert American writer fictionalizing Billy the Kid, or an Australian writing about Ned Kelly.

There were six KU books listed as history for the Dominican Republic, and I would probably read this one if I was going to go visit:

History and Culture of Dominican Republic, Government, Politics Economy, Tourism: Migration, The First Colony
by Uzo Marvin

I’d also look for a humor book, a children’s book, and a science fiction/fantasy book. 🙂 Being me, I’d look for a book on the animals of the country as well.

I suspect I may have some readers with knowledge of the literature of The Dominican Republic, though, so before I keep digging, I thought I’d ask…any recommendations? I’d prefer KU, of course, but regardless, I’m curious. 🙂 Feel free to make them (or add other thoughts) by commenting on this post.

*When you shop at AmazonSmile, half a percent of your purchase price on eligible items goes to a non-profit you choose. It will feel just like shopping at Amazon: you’ll be using your same account. The one thing for you that is different is that you pick a non-profit the first time you go (which you can change whenever you want)…and the good feeling you’ll get. Shop ’til you help!

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog. To support this or other blogs/organizations, buy Amazon Gift Cards from a link on the site, then use those to buy your items. There will be no cost to you, and a benefit to them.

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I’m happy to see Amazon continuing to expand its support for more languages…and not just because our adult kid is a linguist. 😉

More languages often means more diversity of opinion. Even when a book is translated from one language to another (as Amazon does into English with its AmazonCrossing imprint), idiom can change.

When I was in high school, I took more than three years of Russian, because I wanted to be able to read certain things (especially non-fiction) in the original language. I never really got fluent, though. I did much better with Spanish, which I can still read to some extent, at least simple things.

That’s great if you want to learn Spanish! I used to read comic books and the Yellow Pages (remember those?) in Spanish when I was learning it…I think that helped a lot.

It looked to me like these were mostly translations: there was a special selection of Haruki Murakami, and Isaac Asimov’s “Yo, Robot” was also featured.

There were also a lot more categories in the Spanish store! Many of them focused on KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) books, and there is a big promotion for the Mes de autopublicación: (month of self-publishing, I think).

* I am linking to the same thing at the regular Amazon site, and at AmazonSmile. When you shop at AmazonSmile, half a percent of your purchase price on eligible items goes to a non-profit you choose. It will feel just like shopping at Amazon: you’ll be using your same account. The one thing for you that is different is that you pick a non-profit the first time you go (which you can change whenever you want)…and the good feeling you’ll get. Shop ’til you help!

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog. To support this or other blogs/organizations, buy Amazon Gift Cards from a link on the site, then use those to buy your items. There will be no cost to you, and a benefit to them.

and that is different…there are more than 20,000 titles there just in the fiction section.

The difference mostly has to do with licensing, which in turn is based on copyright.

Just because a publisher as the right to sell a book in China doesn’t mean that it has the right to sell that same book in the USA.

It’s not surprising that more publishers would pay for the rights for a book in Chinese in the Chinese market.

This Kindle Store USA storefront recognizes the large number of Chinese readers in the USA, and I think that’s important.

Amazon can both continue to expand to other markets (they just released the Fire tablet in China), and further serve the USA market.

Admittedly, a move like this is a challenge to local Chinese language brick-and-mortar bookstores. They won’t be able to exist just by having books in Chinese, but I don’t think many of them do. Generally, they are destination shops, in some cases with a cultural familiarity, in others, more of a community connection.

This makes the part to thriving for Chinese language bookstores in the USA essentially the same as the path for English language bookstores: make people willing to knowingly spend more money just to support you.

Feel free to tell me and my readers what you think by commenting on this post.

* I am linking to the same thing at the regular Amazon site, and at AmazonSmile. When you shop at AmazonSmile, half a percent of your purchase price on eligible items goes to a non-profit you choose. It will feel just like shopping at Amazon: you’ll be using your same account. The one thing for you that is different is that you pick a non-profit the first time you go (which you can change whenever you want)…and the good feeling you’ll get. Shop ’til you help!

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog. To support this or other blogs/organizations, buy Amazon Gift Cards from a link on the site, then use those to buy your items. There will be no cost to you, and a benefit to them.

Spotlight part of $10 million investment to increase publication of international books into English

SEATTLE—October 15, 2015—(NASDAQ: AMZN)—AmazonCrossing, the literary translation imprint of Amazon Publishing, today announced a commitment to publish exceptional works of literature from Indonesian authors translated into English beginning in early 2016. The announcement coincides with Indonesia’s participation as Guest of Honor at the Frankfurt Book Fair this week.

Indonesian titles planned for publication include:

Nirzona, a love story by Abidah El Khalieqy, set against the backdrop of the Aceh tsunami, a rare moment in recent history when the world’s eyes turned to Indonesia

English-language originals The Oddfits and The More Known World, the first two titles in the Oddfits series from Indonesia-born Tiffany Tsao, a translator and past Indonesia editor at large forAsymptote Journal

Paper Boats, a new adult love story written in glittering, quotable prose from popular novelist, actress, and singer Dee Lestari

A new edition of Laksmi Pamuntjak’s acclaimed A Question of Red and her latest, Aruna and Her Palate, which follows a food writer’s travels through Indonesia

Hummingbird, a stunning work of magical realism from Nukila Amal

“AmazonCrossing is committed to bringing great authors and stories to a global audience, and our spotlight programs have offered an opportunity to focus attention on a range of books from specific countries—something we plan to do more of as part of our continued commitment to the translation imprint’s expansion,” said Sarah Jane Gunter, Publisher of AmazonCrossing and General Manager of International Publishing, referring to previous programs showcasing literature from Iceland, Brazil, and Finland. “Indonesia’s contributions to world literature are not often available to English-language readers and this spotlight reiterates AmazonCrossing’s commitment to bringing stories into English from languages less frequently seen in translation.”

“I feel like my writing and I are difficult to categorize,” says author Tiffany Tsao. “The Oddfits resists classification in many respects. And as someone affiliated with multiple cultures and places, I don’t fit easily into ready-made boxes either. I’m so incredibly happy to be working with a publisher adventurous enough to give oddness a chance.”

The Indonesia spotlight program follows similar AmazonCrossing programs in past years featuring literature from Finland, Iceland and Brazil. The Finnish spotlight program included Katri Lipson’s European Union Prize for Literature-winning literary thriller The Ice Cream Man, as well as books by Leena Lehtolainen, Jari Järvelä, Marko Hautala, and Risto Isomäki. The Brazilian spotlight program launched in 2013 and has included the release of a dozen books of full-length fiction and short stories from Brazilian authors including Luiz Ruffato, Cristovão Tezza, Josy Stoque, and Eliane Brum. In 2012, the Iceland spotlight program included ten Icelandic books, three of which—The Hitman’s Guide to Housecleaning by Hallgrimur Helgason, The Flatey Enigma by Viktor Arnar Ingolfsson, and House of Evidence by Viktor Arnar Ingolfsson—became Kindle Top Ten best sellers.

About Amazon
Amazon.com opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995. The company is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon.

Lawsuits are probably the right tool here. As I wrote before, it’s not clear that writing a false review for money is a criminal act, but a lawsuit could work, since Amazon could show damage. I’m not a lawyer, but that’s my understanding of it.

New Amazon Echo/Alexa round up

I alert my ILMK readers when I write new articles in another blog of mine, The Measured Circle, about the Amazon Echo and Amazon’s Alexa voice services.

What do you think? Should Amazon be suing people who make $5 for a false review? What, if anything, should they do about false reviews? Do customer reviews actually make sense? Are you familiar with any Indonesian literature? Is there another culture you’d like to see get a focus from Amazon? Feel free to tell me and my readers what you think by commenting on this post.

* I am linking to the same thing at the regular Amazon site, and at AmazonSmile. When you shop at AmazonSmile, half a percent of your purchase price on eligible items goes to a non-profit you choose. It will feel just like shopping at Amazon: you’ll be using your same account. The one thing for you that is different is that you pick a non-profit the first time you go (which you can change whenever you want)…and the good feeling you’ll get. Shop ’til you help! By the way, it’s been interesting lately to see Amazon remind me to “start at AmazonSmile” if I check a link on the original Amazon site. I do buy from AmazonSmile, but I have a lot of stored links I use to check for things.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog. To support this or other blogs/organizations, buy Amazon Gift Cards from a link on the site, then use those to buy your items. There will be no cost to you, and a benefit to them.

Oh, I’ve read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Don Quixote, and War with the Newts, of course.

I just haven’t read them in their original languages (French, Spanish, and Czech).

Even though our adult kid is a linguist, I’m simply not fluent enough (if at all). I can blunder through an article in Spanish, and I did three years of Russian in high school. On the latter, I wanted to be able to read some research being done in the then Soviet Union…but I didn’t really become conversational.

I did learn all of Mangani, the language the “apes” speak in the Tarzan books, but that’s not the same thing. 😉

So many of the classics so many of us have read are translations!

I’ll admit, I don’t generally pay much attention to who the translator is of a book. I probably should pay more attention to that. Translated books often seem…stilted to me. I think they tend to use the “correct” language in English, when the author is being slangy in their own.

I knew someone who was a translator. Out of curiosity, this person put “hit the road” (an American English idiom meaning to get on your way) into an online translator (this was more than a decade ago) and had it translate it to French…and then translated it back from French to English using the same software.

The result was “pummel the avenue”. 🙂

I just tried the same experiment with Google translate…and the retranslation was rendered properly as “hit the road”.

Amazon’s traditional publishing wing has had an imprint devoted to translating works into English for some time:

Looks to me like they have around fifty languages from which they will translate (if the book is selected).

Amazon has been a leader on globalizing its e-book devices (they dominated the NOOK on that). They have also been an important way for authors/publishers to reach readers, both as a platform (Kindle Direct Publishing) and as a traditional publisher.

This combines those two strengths.

Amazon could certainly publishes books in the original languages…and in several other languages eventually.

They don’t list the terms on the submission site: that may be negotiated on an individual basis.

I think this is important.

It’s a great goodwill thing for Amazon’s relationships with other countries…even if books aren’t a huge part of their revenue stream.

What do you think? Do you like reading translated books? Do you seek out individual translators? Do you know someone who has had a book published and translated? If so, what was their experience like? Feel free to let me and my readers know by commenting on this post.

* I am linking to the same thing at the regular Amazon site, and at AmazonSmile. When you shop at AmazonSmile, half a percent of your purchase price on eligible items goes to a non-profit you choose. It will feel just like shopping at Amazon: you’ll be using your same account. The one thing for you that is different is that you pick a non-profit the first time you go (which you can change whenever you want)…and the good feeling you’ll get. Shop ’til you help! By the way, it’s been interesting lately to see Amazon remind me to “start at AmazonSmile” if I check a link on the original Amazon site. I do buy from AmazonSmile, but I have a lot of stored links I use to check for things.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog. To support this or other blogs/organizations, buy Amazon Gift Cards from a link on the site, then use those to buy your items. There will be no cost to you, and a benefit to them.

I checked: there was also a flurry around the time of the announcement about new models last year in September.

Now, this pattern is different…those press releases came afterwards or were concurrent. These are (perhaps only very slightly) before.

However, I think that part of what may happen is that Amazon is arranges deals and creates features to make the release of hardware even more exciting. They want heightened interest in Amazon generally as well at that time, and goodwill.

These announcements also give you options even if you aren’t interested in buying new hardware.

“Prime members can now enjoy six months of free unlimited access to The Washington Post National Digital Edition, a subscription usually retailing for $9.99 per month. After the first six months of access to world-class national and international news, Prime members can continue to enjoy unlimited digital access with a discounted monthly subscription rate of only $3.99, a savings of 60% per month.”

I did enjoy the Washington Post (owned by Amazon Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos) when we got it for free for six months on Fire tablets, which I wrote about it:

Even though I could have continued it at a very low cost, I didn’t. It was one of those things where I have enough to read without it, and it was symbolically challenging for me to pay for it at all.

I figure I’ll read it for the six months, and then cancel it again. I don’t feel like that’s cheating: I’m paying for Prime anyway, and they aren’t asking me to get it only if I think I might subscribe.

Note that this time it is for Prime members (not based on having a Fire tablet), and you can read it on many platforms…including the website.

Oh, this isn’t available for current subscribers, by the way…so I guess it’s a good thing I didn’t sign up before. 😉

Interestingly, it is available for download for offline watching. The selection of downloadable Prime Videos has gotten much better recently: a lot more well-known titles. This is a way that Amazon differentiates itself from Netflix and Hulu, and it looks like it wants to push that.

This one was a general Fire TV announcement (and they might be introducing a new version of it, I suppose). That might be in part a response to the new Apple TV announcement…that sounds cool, but it’s relatively expensive. Apple TV will start at $149, as opposed to $99 for the

Hey! The Fire TV is unavailable! Very good chance that means an announcement for a new gen soon…before the end of the week I would guess. I know, I know…I didn’t think that was the case with the Fire Phone when I wrote about it yesterday, but this is different…especially with the announcements of new content.

If TCM is free (to watch the movies, not just to get the app), I’m an especially happy camper. 🙂

This is also useful:

“Fire TV integrated universal search from the very beginning, and customers have loved being able to easily search across multiple services, including HBO GO, Showtime, Hulu, STARZ PLAY, ENCORE PLAY, and Vevo. Plus, Amazon will be adding over 10 services to universal search by the end of the year, including A&E, HISTORY, Lifetime, and PBS.”

Prime Now is this incredible, two-hour delivery service (you can pay $7.99 to get something in one hour).

They are establishing four (!) hubs for this in Southern California, and will be covering quite a few cities (“Los Angeles and Orange County including areas such as Santa Monica, Redondo Beach, Silver Lake and Irvine, to name a few…”).

Additionally, they’ll deliver from some local stores, like Sprouts. My Significant Other likes an Icelandic yogurt called Siggi’s which we can get at Sprouts…but it’s never a good shopping experience. We aren’t covered by Prime Now (yet), but getting it deliveed in two hours at no additional cost? Yes, please.

The winner will “have the opportunity” to be published in print, audio, and e-book by Amazon.

The winner will be announced October 15th.

—

There you go!

In the middle of writing this, I tweeted about the Fire TV unavailability…I wanted to get that out before Amazon made an announcement. 😉

What do you think? Is Amazon about to announce new hardware? What does it mean that they are taking more interest in non-English publishing? Does all of this have to do with new models, or is it just a coincidence and build up for the holiday season? Feel free to tell me and my readers what you think by commenting on this post.

* I am linking to the same thing at the regular Amazon site, and at AmazonSmile. When you shop at AmazonSmile, half a percent of your purchase price on eligible items goes to a non-profit you choose. It will feel just like shopping at Amazon: you’ll be using your same account. The one thing for you that is different is that you pick a non-profit the first time you go (which you can change whenever you want)…and the good feeling you’ll get. Shop ’til you help!

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog. To support this or other blogs/organizations, buy Amazon Gift Cards from a link on the site, then use those to buy your items. There will be no cost to you, and a benefit to them.

I wouldn’t do that unless you are actually living in that other country, though. I wouldn’t want to be committing fraud by misrepresenting where I was. They could likely figure that out if nothing else matches the country in which you say you live.

Another issue can be “public domain”. Not all countries have the same copyright term. A book which is in the public domain (owned by the public…not under copyright protection) in Australia (like George Orwell’s 1984) may not be in the USA. That particular book created quite a problem for Amazon, when a version intended for Australia was accidentally made available to Americans…and then Amazon took it back from people.

I think their intentions were good, and they compensated people more than they had originally paid for it (and they promised never t do it again). There are people who are still soured on Amazon over it, though, so you can imagine what it might be like if Amazon didn’t make good faith efforts to sell the books in the proper markets.

I do think the selling of global rights is becoming much more common (even though it might cost the publisher more initially), so this may become less of an issue over time.

* I am linking to the same thing at the regular Amazon site, and at AmazonSmile. When you shop at AmazonSmile, half a percent of your purchase price on eligible items goes to a non-profit you choose. It will feel just like shopping at Amazon: you’ll be using your same account. The one thing for you that is different is that you pick a non-profit the first time you go (which you can change whenever you want)…and the good feeling you’ll get. Shop ’til you help!

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog. To support this or other blogs/organizations, buy Amazon Gift Cards from a link on the site, then use those to buy your items. There will be no cost to you, and a benefit to them.

Phink has posted what I think are a couple of the best videos I’ve seen so far about the Echo. They aren’t really reviews, they are demonstrations of what the device can do. If you are interested in the Echo, I think they are definitely worth watching to see what your experience might be like.

sales dropped 15%. The article goes on to say why the publishers aren’t worried about that…I guess they have faith. 😉

Video news

I thought I’d group a couple of things together here…a mini-round up. 😉

First, this is just odd to me, but Amazon Studios is working with Sid and Marty Krofft to do a reimagined pilot of one of their series. The Kroffts were really gonzo “kids’ show” producers in the 1970s, although they did a lot more than that.

So, what gets the reboot? The most popular H.R. Pufnstuf? The wacky Lidsville? Electra Woman and Dyna Girl? Nope…Sigmund and the Sea Monsters. This may take a lot of reimagining…Sigmund’s parents were parodies of Archie Bunker and Phyllis Diller, and I just don’t think that’s going to fly with today’s audiences. Hoping they stick with the Johnny Whitaker theme song, though. 🙂

have added a bunch of apps, including the much talked about Sling TV (which may enable some people to drop cable…by paying for a much more focused package), TED (great, though-provoking lectures…this one is free), and Fox Sports GO.

Part of that may be that they have to read so much more for school…a high schooler presumably has a lot more assigned reading than a nine-year old. If they are enjoying that reading, it would probably still not be reported as “reading for pleasure”.

What’s troubling is the decline across age groups since 1984.

It’s possible that there was a big decline (let’s see…video games, maybe?) for a while, and that e-books are, in fact, increasing reading.

Still, the Common Sense Media data reported on here (and shown in an infographic) is not especially encouraging. On the good side, more than a quarter of homes have an EBR (E-Book Reader…they mention Kindles and NOOKs. That would not include tables, like the Kindle Fire).

I like what they’ve done it with it: it looks much better, and seems to be less resource intensive.

Hope you enjoyed my birthday! 😉

We had a great time…we went to Point Isabel in Richmond (rated as one of the top ten dog parks in the world)…our dogs love it there! We also get about an hour walk, two or three miles. I went to doctor yesterday for an annual check-up, and to the DMV to renew my license. When I did the DMV thing, I realized that my weight is down about 55 pounds since I last did a driver’s license! I’m down about 40 pound in the last two years, thanks to the free app I reviewed here:

*When you shop at AmazonSmile, half a percent of your purchase price on eligible items goes to a non-profit you choose. It will feel just like shopping at Amazon: you’ll be using your same account. The one thing for you that is different is that you pick a non-profit the first time you go (which you can change whenever you want)…and the good feeling you’ll get. Shop ’til you help!

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog. To support this or other blogs/organizations, buy Amazon Gift Cards from a link on the site, then use those to buy your items. There will be no cost to you, and a benefit to them.

One of the knocks on the USA Kindle store in the beginning (back in 2007) was the lack of books in Spanish and other non-English languages.

That’s an understandable concern.

While something like one out of ten people in the USA is considered a “Spanish speaker” (speaks Spanish at home), and we are, I think, the fifth largest Spanish speaking country in the world, we didn’t have as many as ten thousand Spanish books in the USA Kindle store until the summer 2011 (about three and a half years after the Kindle store first opened).

February 2015: 125,505 Spanish books out of 3,178,962 = 3%…about 50 times as high a percentage

What Spanish books there were initially seemed to me to be mostly public domain books, with some translations of current books.

I wanted to see if that had changed: has the USA Kindle store started carrying books which are not only in Spanish, but serve the Spanish speaking market(s)?

I thought it might. In December of 2011, Amazon opened a Kindle store in Spain. My hypothesis was that having that would accelerate the number of books available in Spanish, and that those might then make their way to the USA store.

I should point out first that I don’t speak Spanish. 🙂 I use Spanish as an example to get what I am guessing is the best case for a non-English language in the USA store.

I know a bit about Spanish language literature, just from my reading, and I’ll research (which is fun for me) things I don’t.

I shouldn’t have been quite so dogmatic above that I don’t speak Spanish, actually.

I used to speak it near at about a tourist level, and I find I can still read it to some extent. I don’t always need Google translate to understand a news story, although there may certainly be words I don’t know.

For example, when our adult kid was home a couple of years ago, we had telenovelas on TV…oh, and German YouTube and Turkish movies…did I mention my kid is a linguist? 😉 I could understand it well enough to say, “She doesn’t like him, right?” Although at one point, a couple of kids on the show were watching their mother on a TV singing competition, and things started levitating around the room. My kid explained that they were telekinetic…gee, how had I never learned the Spanish word for telekinesis? 😉

Another great example: I was an actor many years ago. We were going out to schools, doing an interactive version of the Wizard of Oz…we would have kids come join us on stage to be part of the show.

At one school, we were told that there were two groups of kids who only spoke Spanish.

I volunteered to take a group, and so did the actor playing the Wizard.

We did okay…but we did run into some vocabulary issues! I couldn’t figure out “haunted forest”, so I went with “arboles misteriosas” (mysterious trees…or close to it). The other actor asked me for “Wicked Witch”…I suggested “bruja mala”. Couldn’t fake “flying monkey”, though…I had to mime it. 🙂

Here we go!

1. Mafalda Y Las Fiestas (Mafalda and the Holidays) by Quino

This is an Argentinean comic strip from the 1960s. While Mafalda’s look reminds me of Little Lulu, my understanding is that this is a strip which also appeals to adults…sort of like Calvin & Hobbes or The Simpsons in that way. It was popular outside of Argentina, but I’m still impressed that country has the number one spot, when there are so many Spanish speaking countries with a strong literary history and which are more commonly translated in the USA. Mafalda is also available in English in the store.

2. Adulterio (Adultery) by Paolo Coelho

This one is translated…but from the Portuguese, not from English. Coelho is from Brazil…and the translated version of The Alchemist was a big hit in the USA as well. This is a title just from last year, 2014, showing that the selection has moved beyond classics.

3. El Asesinato de Pitágoras (The Assassination of Pythagoras) by Marcos Chicot

According to the product page, this was the bestselling e-book in Spanish in the world in 2013. It’s a murder mystery with historical characters. Chicot is from Spain.

When you shop at AmazonSmile, half a percent of your purchase price on eligible items goes to a non-profit you choose. It will feel just like shopping at Amazon: you’ll be using your same account. The one thing for you that is different is that you pick a non-profit the first time you go (which you can change whenever you want)…and the good feeling you’ll get. Shop ’til you help!

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog. To support this or other blogs/organizations, buy Amazon Gift Cards from a link on the site, then use those to buy your items. There will be no cost to you, and a benefit to them.

there were 80,230 Spanish books listed…so in one year, it has increased by about 45%.

I think we will continue to see more and more books in languages other than English.

It’s not as simple as someone translating a book, by the way. Even a book available in another language at a different Amazon site, can’t just be made available in the USA Kindle store without licensing it.

There are 3,301,270 books in Amazon’s Kindle store for Spain at time of writing. Those aren’t all in Spanish, I’m sure, but certainly, there are a lot more books in Spanish in the Spanish store than there are in the USA store.

I believe global rights are becoming more common when books are licensed from the author or the author’s estate.

However, that still doesn’t mean that every book in a language will be made available at every site.

In some cases, the publisher may believe that the book is only appropriate in certain countries. A book specifically about a popular telenovela star might not sell well in the USA when it might in Mexico, for instance.

You might figure, “Why not make it available anyway?” I can understand that idea, but there are costs involved with selling a book, including Customer Service.

I’d love to see every book available everywhere, but that’s just unlikely to happen.

By the way, as an example of another language, there is a Klingon translation of Hamlet in the store. Text-to-speech is not enabled on it, though, so I’m not linking to it.

That’s an interesting point by itself.

You need to have an appropriate voice available for a language to work well with TTS. If you try to use an English speaking TTS voice with Spanish, you’ll get massive mispronunciations.

That’s not just because of the difference in vowel sounds.

The way that TTS works is that a voice artist reads lots and lots of material into a system.

Where the system can match up what was read to what’s in the book, it can use that…which is why things like both “Kansas” and “Arkansas” can be pronounced differently, and why there actually is some inflection in phrases.

Increasingly, we are getting software that can do better translation, but again, that could fall afoul of copyright laws. Making and marketing a new translation of a book under copyright protection in the USA generally requires authorization. I’m not quite sure how that would work if it was done in a streaming fashion, though, without the translation being set into a “permanent” form. My guess is that might be okay, similar to the way that you don’t need for permission for text-to-speech, but do need it for a recorded audiobook.

* I am linking to the same thing at the regular Amazon site, and at AmazonSmile. When you shop at AmazonSmile, half a percent of your purchase price on eligible items goes to a non-profit you choose. It will feel just like shopping at Amazon: you’ll be using your same account. The one thing for you that is different is that you pick a non-profit the first time you go (which you can change whenever you want)…and the good feeling you’ll get. Shop ’til you help! By the way, it’s been interesting lately to see Amazon remind me to “start at AmazonSmile” if I check a link on the original Amazon site. I do buy from AmazonSmile, but I have a lot of stored links I use to check for things.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog. To support this or other blogs/organizations, buy Amazon Gift Cards from a link on the site, then use those to buy your items. There will be no cost to you, and a benefit to them.

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